Publication Diary (1/23/17)

So I'm going to publish a professional-looking adventure/setting/thing this year. Not sure when it'll be done. But I'm doing it. And because I have no idea how to do it (any of it, except the writing part) I'm going to blog about it, so that hopefully anyone who sees this who has ideas (which is all of you) can get the courage and the push to publish your own things.

So I wrote a sandbox hexcrawl last summer. I did it really fast because my party was about to dive into this new region (Avalon's Retreat, see the last post to see where it falls on the map), and because of that (and because I'm a terrible editor) it's pretty shit. Rereading it there were a few points of awesome that I'm taking as inspiration for what I want the entire product to be. Those were these:

Those aren't the only things, but they were ones that made me say "there's still something here". And you can probably see that these things still need work. So yeah. That's what I'm doing.

I got some work done today. I finished my outline (subject to change):

I also populated my word document with the outline and all the expanded shit (like monster names, hex numbers, etc.), so that I can just go in and type without having to worry about formatting.

Then I went and remade the map. Here's the original:

1/2 of this map is not even used. The gray area (the Orc Badlands, which have moved in the world map) and the weird trees on the top left (the Hollow Mire, which also moved) are not detailed. Also there's a lack of a "key" and also a lack of numbers for the hexes.

Here's what the new map looks like:

Huge difference.

It also shows the philosophy I'm going for with this whole product; everything should do as much as possible. Negative space used sparingly or for effect. Charts on same page they'll be needed, but also repeating information, so each hex will have the stats for the monster, but the stats will also be in the "Monsters" section.

After doing this I contacted two artists that I've been following asking them about prices for artwork. I'm hoping to do artwork for the locations and monsters, but with my minimal, college-drained money, we'll see.

I'm about to go check out Lulu.com and see what self publishing is all about. I've never really done it before. I want this product to be an actual book. PDF is cool, but I want to get something in print.

I'll repeat: I have no idea what I'm doing. My hope with these blog posts is that it'll be a learning experience for me and for anyone who reads it. Maybe it's not as hard as it seems? Maybe it's super hard? Who knows...